Patients who suffer from conditions such as epilepsy, asthma, chronic heart disease, Alzheimer's, and other conditions with unpredictable outcomes may need to be constantly monitored for timely assistance and safety. Additionally, patients who suffer from conditions that require periodic shifting of their body orientation in order to prevent digression of the condition or to promote healing from the condition may also need to be constantly monitored to ensure that the proper shifts in their body orientation take place. Examples of conditions that may require periodic shifting may include mobility-limiting conditions such as wheel chair confinement, Restless Leg Syndrome, infants that tend to roll over onto their stomach, or patients at risk for pneumonia that must sit up periodically. Many patients who suffer from such conditions are not monitored continuously because they may live at home by themselves or where family members can not be present at all times or be in a health care facility where attendants are cycled in between patients. As a result, occurrences of life threatening events may go unnoticed until it is too late or shifts in body orientation may be missed, resulting in skin ulcers, pneumonia, suffocation, or any other life-threatening conditions. Currently available patient movement monitoring systems mainly monitor the location of the patient and do not have the capability of detecting small movements such as shifts in body orientation or seizures. Additionally, currently available patient movement monitor systems are typically specialized to monitor for one or two conditions and are not adaptable to multiple conditions that a patient may have concurrently or to multiple patients with different conditions.
A particular problem area concerns pressure ulcers. As patients who suffer from mobility limiting conditions must be monitored and shifted at certain time intervals to minimize the chance for the occurrence of skin ulcers, also known as bed sores. If a patient is left in an orientation for a long time period (e.g., for over 2 hours), there is a risk for development of skin ulcers on one or more contact points along the body. Currently, nurses in health care facilities where such patients are housed visit and “turn” patients at certain time intervals. This method does not, however, take into account movements of the patient in between nurse visits. A common scenario is as follows. In a first visit, a nurse may have assisted a patient to shift from the right towards the left, but in between the first visit and a second visit, the patient may have shifted back towards the right, only to shift back towards the left right before the second visit. From the nurse's perspective, the patient has been on his left for the period between the first and second visits and thus concludes that the patient should now be shifted towards the right, resulting in the patient spending too much time shifted towards the right. In health care facilities, there are commonly too few nurses to continuously monitor any one patient, thus making it nearly impossible to be aware of the shifts that may happen in between any two visits from the nurse.